My talk on antisemitism and philosemitism has been translated into French by Grégory Bekhtari for the French journal, Contretemps. L’article récent d’Houria Bouteldja du Parti des indigènes de la république, « Racisme(s) et philosémitisme d’État », tentait d’éclairer le récit national autour de l’antisémitisme à travers le soutien occidental à l’État d’Israël.…
Comments closedCategory: Solidarity
This is one of the singularly most important pieces I have read about racism in recent times. I will shortly post a longer commentary. However, suffice it to say that Houria Boutledja of Les Indigenes de la Republique, in this intervention made recently in Oslo, blows apart the idea that…
Comments closedRead Mikki Stelder’s critique of the recent Sexual Nationalisms conference that took place at the University of Amsterdam.Although touted as an event critiquing homonationalism and gay imperialism, certain elements in the conference, in particular the racist outbursts of Dutch scholar Gert Hekma, appeared to recompound these racisms. As reported here…
Comments closedAs the Con Dem government in the UK bring in draconian cuts to public services including slashing the higher education budget by 80%, cutting funding to the arts and humanities by 100% and increasing student fees to £9,000 a year, students as young as 13 are fighting back. A third…
Comments closedFollowing on from last week’s guest post by Aren Aizura, I am posting Sara Ahmed‘s incisive comment on the censorship of ‘Gay Imperialism’
by Sara Ahmed
Peter Tatchell invites us to find evidence of ‘my Islamaphobia, racism or support for imperialist wars or the “war on terror”‘ in the articles that can be downloaded from his website. I would like to say that a brief glance at some of these articles shows some very serious problems in terms of the employment of racialised vocabularies for example in: Their Multiculturalism and Ours; Why has the left gone soft on human rights?; The New Dark Ages (you don’t need to read Frantz Fanon to discuss the problem with the use of the very term ‘the new dark ages’ though Fanon, as always would help) and Islamic Fundamentalism in Britain. I don’t have the time in this brief informal response for the call to respond to go through all of the problems with these pieces, for example, with how some of the critiques of ‘universal human rights’ discourse which have been an important part of LGBT, feminist, socialist as well as anti-racist histories are represented as ‘going soft’. I do intend to offer a systematic critique of some of the terms of the arguments used in due course, which I will publish where they can downloaded, in the interests of sustaining and enabling a debate. But I do want to question here how Mr Tatchell is responding to the critique, and even to the critique of the response to the critique (offered by very thoughtful and careful pieces of writing such as the one offered by Aren Aizura). Critiques of racism are reduced and misheard as personal attacks, which is what blocks a hearing of the critique. In the end, the situation becomes re-coded as a question of individual reputation and good will: we lose the chance to attend to the politics of the original critique.
Comments closedby Aren Aizura
I am reprinting the excellent response to the censorship of Out of Place, a book edited by Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake on the interconnections between queerness and raciality. As you will read, the book contains an article, ‘Gay Imperialism’, which critiques what Jasbir Puar for example has termed ‘homonationalism’ and the participation by some gay rights and feminist activists in the perpetuation of Islamophobia through the ‘war on terror’ logic.
The book will not be republished due to an attack by the gay rights activist, Peter Tatchell, who has claimed that he is defamed by the article. The article and the book are an excellent critique of the ways in which discourses of liberation have been subverted in the service of power.
Please read this critique and spread it widely. An interesting comment on his piece and on Peter Tatchell’s stance by Sara Ahmed, author of much interesting work on racism, Islamophobia and ‘diversity’ can be read here.
Read on for Aizura’s article…
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